Mao’s chosen successor was his chief ally in the Cultural Revolution, the talented but neurotic and vain Marshal Lin Biao, the vice-chairman, who, in an attempted coup, was killed flying toward Russia. As the old chairman, now aging, ailing and senile, but still omnipotent, called a halt to the Cultural Revolution, he recognized that the country needed stable management. Lin Biao was dead; Chou was dying of cancer so Mao looked to Deng.
In 1974, Deng was brought back as first vice-premier and effective ruler of the country. But as Mao deteriorated, his wife Jiang Qing along with the rest of the radical faction she led—better known as the Gang of Four—realized that Deng represented a real danger to their plans to take power after the chairman’s death.
Once again, Deng was purged. His old ally Premier Chou Enlai succumbed to cancer and Mao himself died, succeeded to everyone’s surprise by a little-known provincial boss Hua Guofeng. Deng, the leader of the political and military veterans, trusted by both Party and Red Army, led an effective coup against the Gang of Four, who were arrested, tried and imprisoned.
Henceforth he quickly emerged as the leader of China, effortlessly pushing Hua aside. Though he never felt the need for a full Maoist cult of personality nor for the full list of titles such as president, chairman or premier, it was soon clear that Deng was in charge, rechanneling the revolution to preserve absolute one-party communist control but freeing up the economy: “To get rich is glorious!” he supposedly declared. Backed by his protégés such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang and others, Deng, semi-retired, guided China from behind the scenes, enjoying only his position running the country’s chess federation—and the chairmanship of the Party Military Commission which commanded the army. Under his guidance, China negotiated the return of Hong Kong and Macao and emerged as a new military, almost imperial, superpower as its economy boomed. But in 1989, the Soviet Union tottered; eastern Europe regained its freedom; the Iron Curtain was raised. When communist rule was challenged by thousands of students in Tiananmen Square, Deng faced the end of the party’s monopoly on power and, it was ultimately the decision of the paramount leader to crush the protests with total ruthlessness. The China of today—a harsh police state under a communist Party monopoly with an increasingly international imperialistic and economic reach—is Deng’s China.
DUVALIER
1907–71
I am the Haitian flag. He who is my enemy is the enemy of my fatherland.
François “Papa Doc” Duvalier
François Duvalier, the president of Haiti for fourteen years, was a corrupt and brutal autocrat who brought to heel a proud but unstable nation—the first free black republic—through his ghoulish paramilitary death squads, the Tonton Macoutes. With his violent acolytes he plundered the country and terrorized opponents of the regime. Coming to prominence as a medical doctor with a genuinely popular appeal, he resorted to corruption, kleptocracy and voodoo mysticism in which he saw himself as a semi-divine figure, half-Christ, half-voodoo hero Baron Samedi.
François Duvalier was born on April 14, 1907 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. His mother, who was mentally unstable, worked in a bakery and his father was a teacher, journalist and justice of the peace. The couple nicknamed their son Papa Doc after he qualified to practice medicine at the University of Haiti in 1934. In 1939, as a successful young professional, he married Simone Ovide Faine, a nurse, and went on to have four children, three girls and a boy, Jean-Claude, born in 1951, who would later succeed his father in 1971. Duvalier spent a year at the University of Michigan and, with American assistance, won national recognition for his public-health work against tropical diseases such as yaws and malaria, which had claimed countless lives in Haiti.
In 1938, Duvalier formed Le Groupe des Griots, a group of black intellectuals—influenced by the ethnologist and voodoo scholar Lorimer Denis—which aimed to awaken black nationalism and voodoo mysticism in Haiti. Voodoo, which derives from the word vodun, meaning spirit, is an ancient religious practice that originated in west Africa, perhaps as much as 10,000 years ago. It is still practiced by more than thirty million people worldwide, despite once being suppressed and denounced as black magic by Christian colonialists.
In 1946, after the Second World War, Dr. Duvalier joined the government of President Dumarsais Estimé, becoming director general of Haiti’s public health service and then, in 1948, minister of public health. In 1950, however, the government was overthrown by a military coup led by Paul Magloire, who identified Duvalier as a key opponent of the new regime, forcing him into hiding from 1954.
Haiti was notoriously unstable, however, and Duvalier re-emerged in December 1956 after Magloire was compelled to resign. Over the next nine months, the country experienced six governments, Duvalier and his followers participating in them all. Finally, in September 1957, he was elected president in his own right, on a populist platform, promising to end the control of the mulatto elite—those of mixed Latin American and European origin—and claiming to be a voodoo priest. (The “Papa” in his name is a reference to the name often given to Voodoo priests and priestesses.)
Despite the fact that the generals had helped to rig his election, Duvalier did not trust the army and, with the help of his chief aide, Clément Barbot, he decreased its size and created the Tonton Macoutes, or Volunteers for National Security, as a counterweight. The Volunteers, soon known as the Bogeymen, were a thuggish militia, loyal to the president and numbering between 9000 and 15,000. Without an official salary, they were instead given free rein by the government to help themselves through extortion, racketeering and crime—in return, they kidnapped, intimidated and murdered opponents of the regime, as many as 30,000 during Duvalier’s reign. They dressed in quasi-military clothing, wore dark glasses and mimicked the demons of the voodoo tradition, preferring to use machetes and knives rather than firearms to dispose of their victims, whom they would leave strung up as a warning to others. No rivals were to be tolerated in Duvalier’s regime, as his aide Barbot discovered to his cost after he temporarily assumed the reins of government when the president suffered a heart attack in May 1959. On Duvalier’s recovery, he was promptly imprisoned and, after plotting against his former friend on his release, killed in 1963. Others considered a threat were sent to Fort Dimanche, where they were tortured to death.
Having fought off an attempted invasion by Haitian exiles—assisted by Cuban guerrillas—in August 1959, Duvalier soon resumed control. In 1961, a sham election saw his term as president unanimously extended to 1967, Haiti as a result becoming increasingly isolated, as potential allies such as the United States—which had backed him against the 1959 invasion attempt—began to ostracize the regime. This isolation, however, gave Duvalier more room to stamp his cult of personality on the regime, manipulating the voodoo traditions of the island and portraying himself as the embodiment of the nation. He imposed his image on the rural population by mimicking Baron Samedi, a sinister spirit figure in voodoo associated with death, depicted in top hat and tuxedo, with dark glasses and skull-like face. At the same time, despite having been excommunicated by the Vatican in 1964 for harassing the clergy, he associated himself closely with the figure of Christ, one notorious propaganda image depicting Jesus with his hand on Duvalier’s shoulder declaring, “I have chosen him.”
In 1964, Duvalier became president for life in a quasi-monarchical regime, amending the constitution to ensure that his son, Jean-Claude, became president following his death. Baby Doc Duvalier duly took over the country in 1971 at just nineteen years of age, his ostentatious displays of wealth incurring the wrath of the impoverished nation, which remained largely illiterate while the corrupt elite siphoned off the country’s remaining assets. Baby Doc ruled until 1986, when he was overthrown by the military.